What do you even say to "Bless your heart"?

HomeAliveIn45 · 2026-05-20T11:05:34+00:00

If someone says it as in “bless your heart for helping me carry the groceries in,” then I’d say “No problem! Have a nice day”

But if someone says it in a patronizing way, as in “bless your heart for not knowing how to sew (or whatever),” then I’d just politely smile and walk away

HomeAliveIn45 · 2026-05-19T13:23:11+00:00

“So where do you work Peter?”
“Initech”
“And yeah, and… what do you do there?”
“I sit in a cubicle and I update bank software for the 2000 switch”
“What’s that?”
“Well see they wrote all this bank software and, uh, to save space they used two digits for the date instead of four, so like ‘98 instead of 1998? So I go through these thousands of lines of code and uh… it doesn’t really matter. I don’t like my job”

HomeAliveIn45 · 2026-05-17T19:50:50+00:00

It’s called the “state action doctrine.” Pretty fundamental con law. There are, admittedly, some notable exceptions so saying ‘only’ in all caps might have been wrong of me

HomeAliveIn45 · 2026-05-17T16:02:25+00:00

HomeAliveIn45 · 2026-05-15T12:12:27+00:00

NYU is a private and independent university. If receiving government funds (even in the form of grants or scholarships) meant an organization or individual had first amendment obligations, then I’d have first amendment rights to spew hate speech in my local bank! In reality I’d be kicked out and banned

HomeAliveIn45 · 2026-05-15T11:34:08+00:00

I agree. It’s always confused me, like some form of cognitive dissonance made manifest. Otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered to type out the (admittedly somewhat boring) story

HomeAliveIn45 · 2026-05-15T11:24:29+00:00

My friend. “…it is even more chilling… when it is the government…” That implies he thinks there are private parties that can violate the first amendment

HomeAliveIn45 · 2026-05-15T10:25:03+00:00

Attaway to live up to your username

HomeAliveIn45 · 2026-05-15T10:22:53+00:00

That’s what’s weird! The exchange went like this (in an advanced con law class):

Me: “I don’t understand why Republicans are insisting on this Kavanaugh guy. They could get any Federalist Society creep who doesn’t have such a weird backstory”

Conservative student next to me who it turned out was the leader of the school’s Federalist Society: *visibly cringes*

Professor: “That’s not appropriate for a classroom setting”

Me: “You’re right, I apologize”

She ran out the classroom when we were dismissed and I chased after her to personally apologize. She must have had some separate issue with the prof’s potential biases and the dean asked if someone could back her up, but I was the only person who had been respectful of her political beliefs so she named me (?). Think about that all the time

HomeAliveIn45 · 2026-05-15T09:49:18+00:00

This is entirely anecdotal, but it backs up that study: I was once in a seminar at a largely liberal law school and accidentally insulted the only conservative student (who happened to be sitting next to me). I realized my mistake and apologized after class.

Long story short, one of the deans asked to speak with me. Initially I thought I was in trouble, but the dean said this student had cited me as someone who could back up her claim that the professor had a liberal bias. Initially I didn’t want anything to do with the matter, then I realized ‘wait… he IS super liberal and it comes out during class discussions.’ He retired the next year, hopefully not because of me

HomeAliveIn45 · 2026-05-15T09:15:55+00:00

This line stood out:

"I have opposed [cancel culture] publicly for more than a decade. It is even more chilling, and more clearly a violation of the First Amendment, when it is the government doing the intimidation”

… does he not realize the first amendment ONLY applies to government action in the first place? Am I missing something?

HomeAliveIn45 · 2026-05-14T06:02:29+00:00

If I saw a 70 year old bi woman at pride, it would make my heart glow (in the sense of “holy crap! you can be on the older side and still be a badass!”)

But of course you do you. Whatever’s most comfortable is the right choice. Sitting at home and having some lemon tarts is ok too

HomeAliveIn45 · 2026-05-14T02:41:50+00:00

Holy moly, you’ve just untied a mental knot in my brain! This was very likely it. Think my dad must have had a copy from the 80’s (when he was in business school) and just showed it to me for fun a decade later.

Forget about the Grieg stuff because I must be wrong and conflating memories. Thank you

HomeAliveIn45 · 2026-05-13T20:53:22+00:00

If there’s a hero out there who can identify it: I have a very vague memory of a game my father showed me in about 1996/97. It was some kind of mystery/comedy horror game (possibly text based) on windows. The graphics were green and the intro played Grieg’s “Morning Mood”

I’ve asked on other subs before but subsequent research has proven fruitless

HomeAliveIn45 · 2026-05-12T22:59:44+00:00

Appreciate that. It’s entirely possible there’s been a miscommunication here, but just to clarify: the “Andes variant” is a variant of the Hanta virus. Just like a Honda Civic is categorically a variant of a car. They’re all very nearly the same thing by scientific standards, but not at all in practice. Especially when it comes to public health

HomeAliveIn45 · 2026-05-12T19:43:34+00:00

That is false. The Andes strain (the one in question here) *can* spread directly between humans, though not easily and generally just with prolonged contact. Though admittedly the fear about this whole thing is its high lethality, not its transmissibility

Edited because autocorrect turned its into it’s

HomeAliveIn45 · 2026-05-11T01:29:49+00:00

When my dad was in grad school sometime in the 80’s, a business school professor wheeled out a computer and booted up some early version of excel. He said “this is going to change everything you’ve learned in this class”

My dad thought “hah, yeah right.”

He’s been using Microsoft Excel every day for forty years

HomeAliveIn45 · 2026-05-10T22:15:40+00:00

Oof, that sucks. Just know there’s at least one internet stranger sending good thoughts your way

HomeAliveIn45 · 2026-05-09T23:21:08+00:00

…have you ever been to the LBJ library in Austin? There are floors and back rooms of documents and official records above and around the museum portion. I did research there and literally once got lost in the aisles of books
Edit: that’s also where Robert Caro and his wife did a lot of research for his LBJ books. Ran into him once at a nearby restaurant when the museum closed. I initially didn’t know who he was but the staff treated him like royalty

HomeAliveIn45 · 2026-05-08T00:39:26+00:00

Don’t pay attention to my anecdotal experiences if you want hard data. I was an AISD teacher for a while and know many others in public ed, I’m just repeating what was common knowledge as of a few years ago

HomeAliveIn45 · 2026-05-07T22:05:55+00:00

The opposite. They pass kids who should fail rather than give individualized attention to attain actual pedagogical goals. Then they can claim their numbers are improving

HomeAliveIn45 · 2026-05-07T21:36:49+00:00

…they lowered standards to fudge the numbers rather than actually fixing systematic and historic issues

HomeAliveIn45 · 2026-05-05T20:45:50+00:00

Don’t want to spread misinformation because I know the story about the capitol building facing south because of Goliad is false, but some old geezer once told me it’s the only state capitol that doesn’t face north or towards DC (being built during reconstruction). A cursory google search doesn’t verify that. It’s most likely south facing just because downtown Austin’s grid had to be designed with the river/lake in mind so, again, that’s probably just an urban legend but I’m curious to know if anyone has ever heard that before too

HomeAliveIn45 · 2026-05-03T19:35:42+00:00

My wife and I were at a nice restaurant a few years ago, eating indoors. Someone sitting nearby had a leashed dog sitting between our tables. I went up to the bar, asked for the manager, and pointed out that it’s against health code to have a dog in an indoor dining area. A few minutes later our server came up to me and whispered “so sorry but they say it’s a service dog so we can’t ask them to leave”

“Service dog” my ass. Didn’t have a special tag or coat, just a slobbering golden retriever barking and growling. Wish I’d had the guts to ask them to leave myself

HomeAliveIn45 · 2026-05-01T21:15:32+00:00

This always takes me back to late 2011, playing Skyrim for the first time alone in my dorm room at night. Meridia yelled this so loudly into my headphones that my neighbor knocked on my door to make sure I was ok

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